Head of the Education Law Laboratory Szymon Jankiewicz and the junior research fellow Nadezhda Knyaginina presented a report on the topic "The Role of Education Law at HSE University"
Now there are three courses of different levels and different target audiences:
1. "Introduction to education law" at the master's program "Evidence-based educational policy."
During the development of this discipline, students get acquainted with all levels of education in Russia: from kindergarten to postgraduate study, the rights and obligations of participants in educational relations, the legal status of the authorities that manage education, and the legal regulation of financing educational institutions.
This course is not addressed to lawyers, but to researchers and beginner managers in the field of education. The targeted audience of this master's program is students who do not have a legal background, graduates of managerial and pedagogical undergraduate programs. Therefore, this course provides a general overview of the current legislation in the field of education. We use an accessible language, do not overload students with complex legal constructions, solve typical cases that are most often occur in practice.
2. “Legal problems of the educational organization” at the master's program “Education Management”.
The course is addressed to experienced professionals: school principals, their deputies, and entrepreneurs.
As a rule, students in this program also do not have a legal background, however, they are aware of education law due to their practice. Therefore, as part of the course, they expect to get answers to the most difficult questions of school management. So, we consider the following topics: problems of the status of director and teacher, the construction of individual educational tracks, problems of financial management of the organization, interaction with controlling bodies and the parent community.
During the course, we do not describe, but interpret changes in the law, formulate possible solutions to problems, describe typical errors that may lead to the legal responsibility of a headmaster and a teacher, and also form the skill of compiling legal documents.
3. The course "Education Law".
This course was held for the first time this year as a part of the cooperation of the Institute of Education with the Faculty of Law of the Higher School of Economics. Great interest was shown in the new discipline: 95 fourth-year undergraduate students chose it.
On the one hand, while the students of previous courses needed to study the legal aspects of their practical activities, current law students challenged to study the education system in Russia, considering historical, political, social and economic aspects.
On the other hand, we got the opportunity to talk with law students about education through the prism of all branches of law: international, constitutional, administrative, civil, budget, tax, family, labor and social security law.
In addition, much attention was paid to the study of international documents, including soft law instruments, political and strategic documents of Russia. This allowed students to bind politics and law.
“Thanks to our work, the importance of education law both as a set of legal knowledge and as a discipline has grown significantly in recent years at our university. We explain the success of courses in education law by using non-standard interactive teaching methods, adapting the educational program to the needs and characteristics of the audience and studying not matter-of-fact formulations of laws and textbooks, but by analyzing real problems through a legal prism.”